915.10 Stenciling Letters When creating a stencil, you want to keep the “waste” or “negative” of a cut. When using regular fonts, suchas Arial, some of the letters, such as a “B”, “a”, and “e”, will not work because they have interior paths calledchild shapes. Those child shapes are not connected to the waste portion of the material and will be lost fromthe stencil as shown below. The red arrows indicate the child shapes inside parent shapes for the letters“B”,”a”, and “e”: To avoid this, a procedure called stenciling can be used to connect the area outside of the letters to the childshapes, essentially eliminating them. While there are various ways to do this in MTC, the easiest is probablyusing the Eraser tool. In this method a straight line erase, at a preset width, results in the interior shapebeing connected to the outside of the letter. The Eraser Tool is the 8th icon on the Node Mode toolbar and can be activated by first opening theNode Edit toolbar (or pressing W) and then clicking the icon or pressing F8. Zoom in close on the lettering so that you’ll be able to see exactly where you need to erase. When youactivate the Eraser Tool, the following settings will appear at the top of the screen: The Size you enter will normally relate to the height and style of the lettering you are stenciling. In thisexample, the word “Batteries” is typed at a height of 1 inch. The eraser Size is set at 1.5 mm, but it could besmaller or larger depending on your personal preference. Hold down the Ctrl key and the left mouse button and drag the mouse in a straight line where you want toerase. A red line is drawn: Release the Ctrl key and the left mouse button. The “B” will now have a gap through the letter:Overlay TitleTitle welded to a frameLeave uncheckedEnter the Size (thickness) oferaser you want to use.Small horizontal linesat the top and bottomof the red erase lineindicate that the line isperfectly vertical.Hold Ctrl key and drag mouse down, through the middle of the “B”
